Description
NUMBER OF PAGES: 22
CAST: 4 women, 2 men
GENRE: comedy
SYNOPSIS: The ingenius and half-crazy writer Erna Sandorf lives alone in her apartment in New York City and spends the whole day writing her cheap novels. The apartment is designed with austerity. Though she praises her expensive settee, fireplace and carpet, the audience does not see anything. Erna loves her work, she is totally possessed by it and almost never goes out. The only distraction are her three friends – Melanie, Cathy and Susanne, who occasionally come to visit her. Her life and profession, naturally, include a literary agent, Dave, and a psychoanalytic therapist, Graham. In such a creative way of life, it is no wonder that Irma often loses the concept of what is reality and what is a dream or a hallucination. She often asks her friends whether they are real, or whether they are characters from her novels.
The play features characters and events with overturned values and meanings. Erna is pleased to see her books as low literature. She is happy and takes it as a compliment. It is the same with critical letters she receives from her readers. She finds real praise of her work boring. The other characters also behave absurdly.
These principles are the foundation of the comedy and grotesqueness of the play. In the penultimate scene, it is Erna’s birthday. All her friends and acquaintances get together. The scene is full of absurd comedy and bizarreness.
The last scene offers three conclusions. Firstly, it is Erna’s funeral, where everyone is present and even Erna appears for a while as a phantom. This is followed by a real situation, when Erna writes on the typewriter and describes her own funeral, and the final conclusion comes when the psychiatrist arrives and forces Erna to take medicine.
Reality is dismissed. This play is not limited by any logic. The only rule to follow is the more crazy and absurd, the better.
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